The Revolutions (51 page)

Josephine’s heart raced. She felt it in her wings, as if she were about to take flight.

~
Eight? Not nine?

~
See—you do know something. Why are they here? Do you think they are looking for you?
Clotho looked up from her work and watched Josephine closely, waiting for her answer.

~
I don’t know. I hope so. It’s been so long. They may be different people. There are so many people in the Blue Sphere—more than here.

~
I will tell you what I hope, and what I fear. What I hope is that they have come to take you back to your people, and if that’s true, then it would be wicked to keep you from them. Isn’t that so? But I fear that they have come for another reason. I fear these people who have learned to venture from one sphere to another have come to plunder the ruins, to steal secrets of the Eye that are better left where they are. I fear that they have come to make war.

~
Then let me talk to them, and tell them to go home.

~
Good, child. I see we are in agreement.

*   *   *

Orpheus was chosen as the leader of the expedition to the surface. There were six members of his party, counting Josephine. They’d been on the surface of Mars for seven days, which was already far too long, far longer than any previous expedition had dared. Orpheus’ second was a lanky woman whose name meant something like
One-who-stays-in-their-proper-place-from-love;
Josephine dubbed her
Hestia.
Hestia knew as much of the history of Mars-before-the-fall as any scholar in the city—which was to say, not a great deal.
Xanthos
was an artist.
Poet
and
Far-Traveller
rounded out their number; Poet was known for his sharp vision, and Far-Traveller for her swift flight.

~
If you die,
Orpheus said,
you die. They asked me to take you, and I will. I don’t know if this is right or wrong, wise or foolish. But I saw that you are brave, and so I won’t stand in your way.

*   *   *

The moon circled Mars, approaching periapsis. The party ushered Josephine blindfolded through the streets and into a certain tower at the edge of the city. When they let her remove her blindfold, she saw that the tower was windowless, and dark except for the faint red light in Orpheus’ hand. A steep staircase wound up into the dark, and the walls around it were covered with carvings of a kind she’d never seen before on the white moon. They were on the verge of reminding her of something, but Orpheus said,
~
Don’t look.

~
What are they?

~
Not everything was forgotten
, Hestia said. Orpheus shushed them both. They climbed the stairs in silence at first, and then Hestia began to lead them in a solemn chant. The chanting was like a drug, like Atwood’s incense; Josephine felt that she was dreaming. After a long time, the stairs fell away beneath them and they spread their wings. Together they forced their way up into the dark shivering, in the terrible cold, struggling with all their wills against a terrible weight; until suddenly everything turned on its axis and they were hurtling down through blinding light and heat and thick streaming clouds of violet dust, their wings screaming in pain as the clouds parted to reveal Mars beneath them.

*   *   *

There’d been a seventh of their party when they set off from the city. His name was Born-into-Storm. When they came down through the clouds, he wasn’t with them. That was to be expected. It was a dangerous journey, and sometimes people got lost on the way.

*   *   *

Mars rolled out endlessly beneath them. Orpheus led the way. The rest of them trailed behind in a V, like geese. They flew high. It was safer that way, Orpheus said. The surface was haunted.

You could see the things that haunted the surface sometimes, he said. They were clearest at noon. It took Josephine a long time to see what he was pointing to: not so much a
thing
as an absence, cloud-shadows on the land where no shadow should be. These, Orpheus said, were death to enter—he said no more. Whether they were a natural phenomenon or an unnatural one, they were everywhere, when the light was right and you knew where to look for them: like mould growing on the floor of an abandoned room.

Born-at-Midnight was as talkative as Orpheus was taciturn. She was a risk-taker, a scholar, restlessly curious. She told them stories about what was below them. A dust-filled crater was a sea, in Born-at-Midnight’s telling; and not just any sea, but the Sea of Second Sky, which the Nation of the Long Arm had claimed as theirs, and into which the great heroine Bright-Blue-Wing had once fallen, convinced that the water was a world as rich in treasures as the sky. There had been a legend that one day she would return. There was nothing for her to return to now, Orpheus remarked.

A wave-like sweep of sharp little mountains marked the western edge of the migration of the Nation of the Tooth. A crescent ruin in the middle of a jumble of hills was once the library of the Nation of the Pinion—it was long since picked over. Something that looked a little like an amphitheatre sounded, from Born-at-Midnight’s description, as if it had in fact been something roughly theatrical—it was hard to say. They’d lost the art of drama on the white moon, and Born-at-Midnight struggled for words. She was better at battles. This battle or that, acts of heroism, great feats of philosophical disputation, had taken place at one rock or ruin or ravine or another.

There were no borders. This was no one’s country, no one’s home. Thousands of years of history had moved through it. Everything that was now still and dead had once been in motion. Empty skies were once crowded. Desolate purple plains were once forests. What were now dry channels were once rivers, marking the route westwards. Dunes were once hunting-grounds. Born-at-Midnight told them about the animals of Mars: the lopers, the crawlers, the diggers, the stilt-walkers, the balloonists.

Josephine guessed that it was all about a quarter true. That was all right. Her narration was distracting, and calming. Whenever Born-at-Midnight stopped talking, a cold and nameless dread set in: the voice of Mars.

They headed north-west, towards the mountain of the Nation of the Eye. They didn’t like it—those territories, those ruins, that mountain, were taboo to them. They all suspected that Clotho’s fears were true.

One afternoon, to their great amazement, they saw wings in the distance and below. Life and motion on a dead and empty planet. Two ragged creatures, withered to the point of starvation, faded to a dreadful dead colour. Orpheus gave the signal to attack.

*   *   *

Born-at-Midnight and Exalted dragged the other dead wretch over and laid it out in the dust.
~
Poor thing
, Josephine thought.

~
Suppose a straight line of motion
, said Orpheus,
from where this happened.

~
He was holding this when we killed him
, Born-at-Midnight said, holding up a grisly object.
What is it?

~
I don’t know,
Josephine said.

~
Nor I
, Orpheus said.
Nothing I’ve seen on Mars before. Suppose that they flew straight, all the way from where they met your people to where they crossed our flight. Then they met your people in the country of the Eye. Perhaps not far from the mountain.

After a moment’s further thought Josephine recognised the object as a human hand. She recognised the golden ring on its finger; it had belonged to Mr Sun. It had been severed at the wrist by the blow of some sharp blade.

Chapter Thirty-seven

The terrain climbed steeply, sweeping up and up into the great mountain. Better not to think how
far
up. Better not to look at the mountain at all, if you could help it. Even Payne and Frank, who boasted of their campaigns in the mountains of Afghanistan, said that they’d never seen anything like it, and confessed that it made them feel so small they practically vanished. Better to keep your eyes on your feet, anyway. There was sharp flint underfoot, treacherous scree. There were ravines, crevasses, sudden drops that you might not notice in the gloom and the dusty wind. One had the sense that the mountain had once risen quite violently from the plains, spinning up like a whirlwind, leaving the land all around ragged and cracked. They tied themselves together for safety, looping the rope around their hungry waists and clutching it in their bony fists.

They’d left one of the sleds behind. It would only slow them down, Atwood said. Their destination was at hand, and a few tins of soup wouldn’t make much difference one way or the other. It was time, he said, to abandon the comforts of home; it was time to depend on their inner resources.

The second sled broke after half a day’s upward struggle. After that, Arthur and Vaz carried what they could in their packs. A little food, a little water, some lanterns and matches, Atwood’s most essential papers. Payne and Frank took the rifles, and watched the sky, in case the raiders returned.

They were being pursued again. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind about that. Neither Frank nor Payne could ever quite see the wings of their pursuers, though from time to time one of them would yell and fire into the sky. The air was too gloomy; it grew darker and colder and harder to breathe as they climbed the mountain, and the shadows lengthened in a predatory way. They
knew
that they were being hunted, whether anyone could see their hunters or not.

Dimmick walked at the front of their procession. When night fell, he held a lamp. It was unnerving to walk in the dark, but at least, Vaz remarked, they didn’t have to look at where they were going any more.

Atwood refused the rope. He went on ahead, setting the pace. Dimmick held the rest of them to it. When they slid, Dimmick pulled them along. At times they ascended at such a steep angle that on Earth they would have had to go on all fours.

Some time in the evening, Arthur found himself walking alongside Frank. He blinked. It seemed that Frank had for some time been hissing
Shaw! Shaw!
in his ear.

“Shaw? Are you with me? Please, Shaw.” Frank whispered and whined. He sounded like a man pleading for his life, or his sanity.

“Shaw?”

“What, Frank? I was somewhere else entirely.”

“Atwood, Shaw. Atwood. We have to kill him, Shaw. It’s our only hope of ever waking from this terrible nightmare. Weren’t you listening, Shaw? I’ve tried—by God, I’ve tried to wake up. It’s Atwood’s will that keeps us here. A bullet will settle this.”

“You have the rifle, Frank.”

“If not for that ape of his, I’d do it. He killed Sun, you know. He planned it; he planned it somehow. Sun knew—Sun knew what he was up to. I don’t. Thank God I don’t. I’m afraid, Shaw. I hear voices, whispering the most terrible things.”

“That’s enough, Frank.”

“Of course. You don’t want to wake, do you? You’re in it with him. You’re all as mad as each other.”

“I think perhaps I should take the rifle for a while, Frank. What do you say? You could do with a rest.”

Frank released the rifle without a struggle.

“I have a boy, you know. My son. In London. Studying to be a doctor, of all things. Atwood promised to pay for his education.”

“Good man, Mr Frank. Good man.”

Dimmick watched all of this, grinning nastily.

*   *   *

That night Atwood permitted them to stop and sleep if they could.

Arthur slept. When he woke—to Atwood’s boot poking his shoulder—Dimmick and Frank were both gone. Atwood held up the lamp. Vaz was still asleep. Payne sat upright, staring fixedly at his boots.

What appeared to have happened was that Frank had murdered Dimmick in the night, killing him with his own ice-axe while he slept. Some bloodstains, snagged threads, and other clues suggested that Frank had then wrapped Dimmick’s body in a blanket and rolled it over the rocks into a crevasse, before fleeing into the darkness, where probably he, too, had ended up in a crevasse. The motive was unclear. Mutiny of a sort, presumably. Madness. Revenge. Nobody had much interest in investigating further.

“I thought Dimmick might outlast us all,” Arthur said.

“He had his strengths,” Vaz said, judiciously.

“See here,” Atwood said. He crouched down and held the lamp low. There were bloody bootprints on the rock next to where Atwood had been sleeping.

“He meant to kill me, too, as I slept. Gentlemen, did you know what he planned? Know this: if I die, you are at the mercy of this place.”

“Don’t threaten us, Atwood. We’ve come this far with you. We’ll see it through. What other choice do we have?”

“I know, Shaw. I know. I’m sorry.”

Suddenly, and to Arthur’s surprise and disgust, it looked as if Atwood might be about to cry.

“You’ve been a good friend to me, Shaw.”

“Well, Atwood. Well. If you say so.”

“I shall miss Dimmick; he would have been very useful in what’s to come. My trials are not done.”

*   *   *

They were already on the march again when the sun rose. At their current dizzying elevation, the sunrise was a sudden explosion of blazing violet light. It revealed that a field of glittering flint lay before them, and in the middle distance, there was a ruin.